


Follow Your Arrow

by marginalia



Category: Bletchley Circle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/pseuds/marginalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Millie seeks adventure, and finds it closer to home than she had expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Follow Your Arrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LookingForOctober](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForOctober/gifts).



_To Bletchley, in the first place_

Millie's first big adventure was Bletchley Park itself. Until then, adventure had been a thing she read about in books, a thing she saw at the cinema, a thing she dreamed about while listening to stories her parents' guests told over meals.

After she had been at Bletchley for a while, she considered that one of those people must have recommended her. Someone who knew her family, who knew her character, who knew she could speak German, could translate it on sight, could keep things to herself. She had been unaware, auditioning for an incredible role in front of an anonymous director.

All the world's a stage, indeed.

But even without knowing who might have been behind it, when Millie got the official letter, there was no question. She would go. She didn't know what she would be doing, or for how long, or for whom, but when summoned to Bletchley, she went.

England expects that every man will do his duty, and every woman will too. 

It all felt a bit like a novel, but the sort of novel changed from day to day. When she arrived, it was a spy story, all cloak-and-dagger, arriving by train in the middle of the night, making her way to the Park with two other girls, all of them signing the Official Secrets Act before anything at all was explained to them. 

Not that anything at Bletchley was ever fully explained. Careless Talk Costs Lives, of course, but there was also just so much going on, and so urgently, work being done by so many brilliant people, that you accepted your task and got down to work, a cog in the code breaking machine. Millie's job was translation, naturally, but also a bit of a cheerleader, encouraging the other girls to speak up about their potential discoveries. She'd always had an ease with people, and it came in useful in their Hut, smoothing over the many differences to move along the work.

It came in useful outside of her shift too, when Bletchley was an entirely different sort of novel. It was a bit of an overgrown girls school, ladies outnumbering the gents by a significant margin, and most of them young and looking for a bit of fun when the intense, mentally draining work of the day was done. Millie was in the thick of it, from skating on the pond to amateur theatrics to dances, both in town and up at the House.

Everywhere there was a kind of freedom. Even in the work, which might well have looked mechanical, there needed to be freedom to think creatively, to have mad ideas and try them out, to break the pattern. That freedom was an adventure.

Bletchley shot her into a future where she could form herself into the person she truly was.

::

_With Susan, in dreams_

Millie's argument was simple: "You're coming. You're not going to be ordinary, sitting in London, knitting the afternoon away. Not now. Not yet. Not ever, if I can help it."

They had often talked about it dreamily in the night, or whatever passed for night given the round the clock shift work. When the other girls were asleep, but Susan was still buzzing from cracking a particularly tough cipher, Millie would talk with her low and quiet about all the places they could go when the war was over. Storytelling Susan to sleep in yet another uncomfortable billet. 

When the end of the war came, though, it became painfully clear that Susan was too contained, too rational to make the leap. And when the money from her family ran out and Millie made her way back to England via a string of small jobs, some more legal than others, she saw clearer the risk it would have been for her friend. Sometimes we need to be safe before we can have an adventure. Not everyone can go out to sea without a harbor to come home to.

Everywhere Millie went, she took Susan with her. In the letters and postcards she sent back, in imagined conversations, and in the contacts -- from society and from her work -- who she visited with all over the world.

"So many clever women," she said. "If only we set our minds to crime." 

"If only I'd learned Japanese," an imaginary Susan responded dryly. "I would have had a trip courtesy of the Foreign Office. So much clerical work to be done abroad."

::

_With Lucy, after_

Having someone to look after made for a lovely change, Millie discovered to her surprise, in spite of the painful reason Lucy had come to her. She wished she had worked harder to keep in contact after, with all of them, not just Susan. Lucy had been hiding behind a mask for all the years since the war, pretending she had a dull, ordinary mind, pretending to be a happy wife. The minute she spotted a safety net, she jumped.

Millie should have been there years ago, arms open to catch her. She had never felt that need that so many women seemed to, that need for a husband, for children. Her life was quite full enough as it was, thank you very much. But the moment when she applied Lucy's lipstick before she set off as a trap on the train plucked a chord deep in her that was only resolved when the small bed was set up in the corner of her flat.

Lucy had been so young when she came to Bletchley, young even for that largely-collegiate community. She had been sent, like so many, by a teacher who knew someone, another secret back room discussion between men changing another young woman's life.

She was brought to the project for her memory, for her perfect recall of everything she ever saw. Her vision of the past utterly clear, but the future was a place she never thought to look at deeply. 

It had been no challenge for her to keep the secrets of her past from Harry. He had no interest. He had been dashing when they met, swept her off her feet, but slowly he changed, so slowly that even she could not see quite where it had happened. All the code was corrupted, but the end result was part of a pattern she had seen played out in lives all around her. That is what life was, and she locked away what life had been before.

In the safety of Millie's care, the locks came undone and the nightmares began. There was so much from before to remember, the code they could do nothing with, lest it betray their existence and success to the enemy. The horrors of the stories and speculation about where information had come from and where it was going. Maybe it was because of the girls, maybe it was because she was finally safe, but it all came back, clear as if it was happening now before her eyes. Lucy would try to keep quiet, but Millie always knew.

One day Millie came home to find her daydreaming in front of the display of postcards. "They're so peaceful," Lucy said. "Even the places where, you know." 

"They are. You need to see them. We'll go together," Millie said, squeezing her shoulder. "We'll find a way."


End file.
